Friday, 30 July 2010

Summer!

The summer touring season is basically finished for me now, and I haven't had time to write a single thing! I'll attempt to sum it up in a few paragraphs..

Since May The Spasm Band has been fairly busy touring with our new line-up, with Michel Castellanos on drum kit and Jozef Berk on congas/timbales. The majority of the shows have been festival dates around Europe, including France, Belgium, Czech Rep, Norway, Slovenia, and we played at Mawazine Festival in Morocco. As usual we had very little time to check out any of the countries we played in.. There were a few highlights: Bergen was spectacular, and the Nattjazz festvial was excellent. The Mawazine festival stage was really impressive, probably one of the biggest I've ever played - I was just gutted we didn't get to try any amazing Moroccan cuisine! The most recent tour took us to the South of France for three shows - not a bad place to tour in July! The tour ended with a great show in a quarry near Montpellier - deep resonance from the rocks on all sides.

In between Spasm Band tours I had a couple of festival gigs with Chik Budo. In June we played the biggest of them all - Glastonbury. Sadly we weren't booked on the mainstage, but the DogFacedGeisha's bar had it's own charms. The venue was tucked away in an area called Block 9 - a spectacular post-apocalyptic film-set, complete with burnt out cars and trains, plus a gay disco and a dubstep arena! We were lucky enough to have passes for the whole weekend, and stayed to the end (to see Stevie Wonder!). We also had a fantastic gig in July at a great little festival in Devon called Wattsfest. Definitely recommend it!

Chik Budo also currently have a free download available from the website. Go and get it here.